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Mafia: The Old Country devs aren't worried about it being compared to GTA 6, because the two series have been diverging for the past 22 years.
In an interview with IGN, Mafia: The Old Country game director Alex Cox and Hangar 13 president Nick Baynes were asked how they felt about their sprawling crime caper releasing in the same year as GTA 6, especially since the two games come from the same publisher. In response, Baynes suggested that the timeframe involved in making modern games is now so long that "you just create the best thing you can and you hope it stands on its own two feet."
In fact, he suggests he's not really worried about any games coming out next treading on his turf, because "we're making it for Mafia fans, it's the story we want to tell in the Mafia universe. Honestly, outside of the chat down the pub about how we feel about the market generally or what's coming out next, [other games are] not something that we ever talk about. We just want to make the best Mafia game possible."
Cox expands on that, suggesting that Mafia and GTA are not only "different games," but they've been becoming more different to each other over time. "If you track both GTA and Mafia since 2000-ish, 2002 when GTA 3 and Mafia came out, they were mechanically very similar games. But Mafia's always had a bit more focus on its linear narrative versus the sandbox experiences, which Rockstar does industry super-best quality. Actually Mafia over time has become increasingly more about the linear story, and so I don't think the games are fundamentally that similar other than they have a shared theme."
Baynes goes on to explain that The Old Country is comparable to the linear stories of Mafia 1 and 2, and Cox says that it's not an open-world game "in the strictest sense." To explain that, Baynes says that "you're not going to be playing Mafia: The Old Country and going off and doing endless side quests and doing activities in the world." That's certainly not what we're expecting from GTA 6 (particularly after GTA 5), so maybe that will serve Hangar 13 pretty well.
Mafia: The Old Country leaked its Summer 2025 release window ahead of its The Game Awards reveal last night, so perhaps it won't drop too close to Rockstar's new game.
